Stereoscopic, or three-dimensional, photography is based on the principle of human vision. Two separate detectors (the eyes) detect the same object from slightly different angles and project them onto two planes (the retinas). The resulting images are transferred to a processor (the brain) which combines them and gives the perception of the third dimension, i.e. depth, to the scene.
Since the first practical demonstration of a stereoscope by Wheatstone in 1838, many different methods of creating and displaying stereo images have been developed. Most are hardware based methods such as using two cameras with a fixed relation between them or a single camera with two lenses to photograph a scene and produce the two slightly shifted images needed.
Similarly, many methods of viewing the stereoscopic images have been developed and include the use of colored or polarizing filters to separate the two images, temporal selection by successive transmission of the images using a shutter arrangement, or physical separation of the images in the viewer and projecting them separately to each eye. The last method was, on the one hand, the one originally used by Wheatstone and, on the other hand, employed in the latest virtual reality techniques.
The above mentioned methods of producing and viewing stereoscopic images and are well known in the art and need not be described in further detail herein.
Stereoscopic series of images are, in principle, nothing but a series of stereoscopic images that are viewed in succession. They are usually produced by means of series of images cameras with two slightly displaced lenses that record pairs of frames of images. Each frame shows the scene at a slightly different angle than its partner. In order to obtain a film in which the viewed action appears to flow continuously and naturally, the utmost stability is required during the photographing process. As a result, to date prior art stereoscopic series of images have been produced only by use of specially designed and stabilized cameras.
Methods of producing a seamless stereo pair of mosaics from a moving video camera have been developed by, for example, Peleg, et. al. [WO 00/39995] and Zhu, et. al. [Parallel-Perspective Stereo Mosaics, IEEC International Conference on Computer Vision, Vancouver, Canada, Jul. 2001, Vol. 1 pp. 345–352]. In order to produce three dimensional effects, according to these methods, matches are performed on the stereo mosaics and not on the individual video frames. These methods essentially take a video film and turn it into a static mosaic. The resulting views are static and don't give the viewer the feeling of motion of the camera that was contained in the original film.
To date, no method has been proposed to produce stereoscopic series of images from a video film produced by a hand held video camera. Also, in none of the existing methods is it possible to record an audio track together with the original series of images and to reproduce it with the resultant stereo images.
It is therefore a purpose of the present invention to provide a method of producing a stereoscopic movie from any series of consecutive images of a scene in which the conditions of parallax necessary for human vision exist.
It is another purpose of this invention to provide a method of producing stereoscopic movie from a series of consecutive images of a scene, the images being acquired without the use of specialized cameras, tripods, or stabilizing equipment.
Further purposes and advantages of the invention will appear as the description proceeds.